The Great Long Tail Debate: Viable Model or Superhighway of Crap?

Since Chris Anderson wrote his best-selling book, The Long Tail, there has been much speculation over whether or not this conception of the future of content distribution is beneficial or detrimental to the music industry at large.

For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it derives from a typical demand curve, which looks like this:

The basic premise is that with the advent of Internet, content (in our case, music) can be produced much more cheaply and distributed at virtually no cost. Brick-and-mortar distribution models rely on scarcity; factors like shelf space, storage and store location that limit the variety of products available. Thus, only the broadest, most commercially-viable products (and as such, the least niche-friendly ones) can be stocked, leaving the vast majority largely unavailable to consumers.

As production and distribution costs fall to zero, businesses (in theory) can harness the Internet to realize serious profits by selling small amounts of a much larger array of harder-to-find products, which, in aggregate, can be quite significant.

Check out this TED talk from Chris Anderson for more info:

However, as wonderful as this concept is, exploiting it may have far-reaching implications. While many companies (Amazon, Netflix, TuneCore, CDBaby, ReverbNation) have successfully taken advantage of Long Tail business models, there has been considerable backlash from some music industry professionals regarding the effect these models have had on the quality of content.

More specifically, a particularly vocal dissident of Long Tail distribution of music has been Tom “Tommy Boy” Silverman, founder of Tommy Boy Records has focused his (sometimes rather scathing) opinions at one of the biggest champions of the Long Tail model, TuneCore’s CEO Jeff Price (formerly of eMusic).

TuneCore’s model basically removes the barriers of entry for the digital distribution of music; allowing anyone to submit their music to outlets such as iTunes (regardless of quality), previously a privilege available only to signed acts.

So what’s the beef? Silverman basically bemoans the fact that TuneCore (and similar models) fills the digital music space with “noise” created by mere “hobbyists” and has tried to back this up publicly at a variety of conferences and in this recent Wired article (highly recommended reading). The argument is getting fairly personal in the media, but I think this is a very interesting point of contention.

While many TuneCore distributed artists never achieve significant release numbers, the question in my mind is, so what? If a product is good enough, it will get traction in a crowded marketplace (even if not as much as in the heyday of CDs and N’Sync).

CD sales in every genre are in the toilet, signs of a dying format. However, just because consumption habits are increasingly digital doesn’t imply that these “noisy hobbyists” on TuneCore represent a major cannibalization threat to quality products elsewhere.

The challenge we see here for artists is getting traction in a crowded market, but when was it ever easy to get ahead? When services like TuneCore didn’t exist, there were simply different (higher) barriers to entry, such as not having a record deal.

The market has always been crowded, both when gatekeepers controlled the major distribution channels and when companies like TuneCore opened them up. The main difference now is who gets to decide what’s popular, the label execs or the consumers. Who’s to say what constitutes great music? Who can really hate free expression and virtually-free distribution? I’m certainly not complaining; I have no trouble finding the music I love.

I think it’s less productive to discredit services that have found a way to profit off of populating the marketplace and more productive to discuss solutions for exposing artists effectively to their target audiences. Perhaps focusing efforts on filtering content to reach target niches is the next power play, but complaining certainly isn’t getting us anywhere.

No one said it would be easy, but as in all other disciplines, the cream always rises. Great products only have trouble spreading if they are, in reality, not great products. Don’t hate the service, hate the game.

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